Q3F Server Fundamentals

[Stager]

I haven't seen hardware requirements for running a Q3F server. From my experience below it seems that the number of nodes a server can successfully operate is directly related to the hardware. What am I missing, or what upgrades do I need???

I have a machine sitting outside our Firewall (for outside-the-Firewall-testing purposes) that I can run a dedicated server on. To me an NT4SP6 400MHz Celeron w/128MB machine on a T1 should be able to handle 20 nodes, right? Well, a configuration of 18 public and 2 private nodes produces an unplayable environment - with only a single connected client! Symptoms are the frequently recurring "unplugged" network icon and 100 pings sporadically exceeding 1000... (unplayable)

I did all kinds of tweaking - RWIN/MTU (via dslreports.com suggestions), fresh OS and SP6 install, killed unnecessary services, latest NIC drivers (3C905B-TX at 10Mb), hunkmegs from 36 to 96 (wasn't sure which way was correct for a server environment). The only positive results achieved occured when I decreased the nodes to 12 or 10.

Any ideas anyone?

[Dekard]

Whats your sv_maxrate set too? Try lowering it to about 7000-8000 will probably make it much better if it's not set there already.

[Stager]

Thanks for the advice.

sv_maxRate is set to 8000

I will try a setting of 7000

[Stager]

I just did some checking into the sv_maxRate setting and found this:

New Updates to version 1.16j
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The Auto-download rate is controlled by 'sv_maxRate', specify this value in bytes per second. The maximum band rate caps out around 25K per second.
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Since I've disabled map downloading (sv_allowdownload 0), I've now set sv_maxRate to 0.